‘My dears’, wrote Adorno to his parents on 13 January 1940. ‘We were overjoyed to hear from Leo Frenkel, who called us last night, that you have landed – and immigrated! – successfully. We send you our warmest welcome to the land that may be ugly, and inhabited by drugstores, hot dogs and cars, but is at least safe to some extent at the moment!’1 Maria and Oscar had arrived in the United States after initially sailing from Hamburg to Cuba. At the time, their son was in New York, serving as Horkheimer’s deputy while the director was travelling on the West Coast and planning to work on a project that would trace the psychology and typology of present-day anti-Semitism. Given what had happened to Adorno’s parents, the project had personal resonance. Since 1938, the Nazis had stepped up their policy of compelling Jews to emigrate and on November 9 and 10 of that year, had unleashed Kristallnacht, in which Jewish homes, hospitals, synagogues and schools were destroyed, hundreds of Jews killed and tens of thousands arrested to be imprisoned in concentration camps. This rise of Nazi violence against Jews would soon lead to what became known as the Final Solution. In Frankfurt, Adorno’s father, nearly seventy, was injured during the ransacking of his office. He and Maria were then arrested and spent several weeks in jail, and his right to dispose of his property was withdrawn. Suffering physical and emotional after-effects, Oscar contracted pneumonia so that the couple could not immediately use their travel permit to sail to Havana; when they did arrive there they were obliged to wait several months before being able to travel to the United States.
Throughout these terrible times, Adorno kept up a charmingly infantile correspondence with his parents, often signing off ‘your old child Teddie’, before, presumably, returning to his work on the fetish character of music and the study of anti-Semitism. He begins one postcard to his mother ‘My dear, faithful Wondrous Hippo Cow … may you continue to live with the same contentment, the same security, and the same stubborn superiority as the hippo cow overleaf.’2 Overleaf was a photograph of Rose the hippopotamus in New York City Zoo. He and his wife Gretel ended their letters to his parents: ‘Heartiest kisses from your two horses, Hottilein and Rossilein’ or ‘Heartiest kisses from Your old Hippo King and his dear Giraffe Gazelle.’ It’s especially lovely to stumble across such sentimental endearments in Adorno’s letters, not just because they’re an antidote to the customary asperities of his grown-up writings, but also because they stem from real affection – they are not what one might have expected, the desperately cheery mask of one who can see the abyss opening behind his parents as they travel towards him. ‘It seems to me’, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer, whose parents Moritz and Babette similarly scrambled to flee anti-Semitic Germany, ‘as if all the suffering we are accustomed to thinking of in connection with the proletariat has now been transferred to the Jews in horribly concentrated form.’3 A decisive moment for critical theory – the suffering of the proletariat, which was ostensibly the purpose behind the foundation of the Institute for Social Research – was being superseded as an object of the Frankfurt School’s attentions. Indeed, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – to which they added the final chapter on anti-Semitism in 1947 – scarcely mentions the proletariat during their analysis of ‘why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’.4
The safe arrival of Oscar and Maria in the United States was a solace to Adorno, especially as the position of German refugees became more difficult once the Second World War began in September 1939. In France, for instance, German speaking émigrés who lived in Paris were rounded up and interned in a football stadium called Yves du Manoir in Colombes. Walter Benjamin, who had been living in materially perilous exile in the French capital since fleeing Berlin in 1933, was among them. He was not German enough to live in Germany (the Nazis had stripped German Jews of their citizenship), but German enough for the French to incarcerate him for three months in a prison camp near Nevers in Burgundy. On his return to his apartment at 10, Rue Dombasle, Benjamin wrote what turned out to be his last essay, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which includes the following words: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.’5
On 13 June 1940, the day before the Germans entered Paris, he and his sister Dora, who had just been freed from an internment camp, fled for Lourdes in unoccupied France.6 Benjamin had cleared his flat of his most important papers – including the 1938 version of Berlin Childhood Around 1900, a version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, and his copy of ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ – and entrusted them to Georges Bataille, the writer and librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The remainder were confiscated from his flat by the Gestapo, who had orders to arrest him.
There was no doubt he was in great danger. A few days before, the French Republic had been dissolved and in the ensuing armistice between the Third Reich and Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy Regime, refugees from Hitler’s Germany were in danger of being shipped back to Germany. The United States had distributed some emergency visas through its consulates in unoccupied France to save Nazis’ political opponents – a category of refugee at particular risk if they were returned to their homeland. Benjamin’s fellow German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, at the time also on the run from the Nazis and their French lackeys, would later write that this category of refugees ‘never included the mass of unpolitical Jews who later turned out to be the most endangered of all’. Benjamin was equivocal about taking up one of these visas. ‘How was he to live without a library, how could he earn a living without the extensive collection of quotations and excerpts among his manuscripts?’ Arendt wrote. ‘Besides, nothing drew him to America where, as he used to say, people would probably find no other use for him than to cart him up and down the country to exhibit him as the “last European”.’7
In Lourdes, a market town in the foothills of the Pyrenees that has become the centre for Roman Catholic pilgrimage and miraculous cures ever since Bernadette Soubirous saw visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858, Dora and Walter suffered. She was enduring ankylosing spondylitis and advanced arteriosclerosis, while his heart condition was made worse by the elevation and, doubtless, by the threat of falling into the hands of the Nazis. It was a very justifiable fear, we realise with hindsight: their brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. Walter’s chief consolation during those two months in Lourdes was reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.
Benjamin knew little of the work that the exiled Frankfurt scholars in New York were doing to try to bring him to safety in America; nor were they sure of his whereabouts – letters and postcards from them arrived at his flat in Paris after the Gestapo had raided it. But they tried to make arrangements for him on the other side of the Atlantic. At one point, thanks to Horkheimer’s efforts, Benjamin was to become a professor at the university in Havana, loaned there by the Institute.
After two months in Lourdes, Benjamin learned that the Institute had secured a visa for him to enter the United States. It was to be issued to him at the US consulate in Marseilles. He headed off, leaving his sister in Lourdes and to her fate (she was later to hole up in a farm and the following year made it to neutral Switzerland). In Marseilles, he returned in horrible circumstances to a city that, like Naples or Moscow, he loved for its collectivist chutzpah, its very unGerman vibrancy. At the start of the 1930s, he had published two essays hymning the city, one entitled ‘Marsellies’8 and the other, ‘Hashish in Marseilles’, an endearingly crazed description of a happy crawl through its bars and cafés ‘in the ecstasy of trance’.9
But the Marseilles he encountered in August 1940 was very different, teeming with refugees terrified of falling into the Gestapo’s clutches, and his experiences there were anything but ecstatic. At the US consulate, he was issued with an entry visa for the US and transit visas for Spain and Portugal. He plunged into depression, contemplating all kinds of mad schemes to get out of Europe – one of which involved him and a friend bribing their way onto a freighter bound for Ceylon disguised as French sailors.
In mid September he and two refugee acquaintances from Marseilles decided, because they had no prospect of leaving France legally, to travel to the French countryside near the Spanish border and try to cross the Pyrenees on foot. His plan was to go through the ostensibly neutral, though fascist Spain to Lisbon and sail from the Portuguese capital to the US. In New York, in expectation of his arrival, Theodor and Gretel Adorno were looking for a place for Benjamin to live. Meanwhile, the odds of him and the other refugees even reaching Spain had diminished because Vichy officials were closely guarding a direct route to their Spanish destination, Port Bou. So, on September 25, a little group of refugees including Benjamin, started over the mountains following a rugged, remote trail. One of the group, the political activist Lisa Fittko, was worried that the poor state of Benjamin’s heart would make it a risky crossing, but he insisted on coming along. Throughout the journey, he would walk for ten minutes, and stop for one minute to catch his breath – all the time clutching a black attaché case that, he told Fittko, contained a new manuscript that was ‘more important than I am’.10 But that wasn’t all he was carrying: the writer and fellow refugee Arthur Koestler remembered that Benjamin had left Marseilles with enough morphine to ‘kill a horse’ (indeed, Koestler himself tried and failed to take his own life with morphine around this time). When, on a hot September day they were in sight of Port Bou, one member of Benjamin’s party noted that he looked on the point of having a heart attack. ‘We ran in all directions in search of water to help the sick man’, recalled Carina Birman.11
Worse was to come. When the refugees reached Port Bou and reported to the customs office to get their papers stamped to travel across Spain, they were told that the Spanish government had recently closed the border to illegal refugees from France. As a result, the party faced being returned to French soil – probably to face internment then transportation to, and murder in, a German concentration camp. They were put under guard at a hotel, where Benjamin, in despair, wrote a suicide note that he gave to one of his fellow refugees, Henny Gurland. Gurland said later that she thought it necessary to destroy the note, but reconstructed it from memory: ‘In a situation presenting no way out, I have no other choice but to make an end of it. It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life will come to a close.’12 Later that night he is believed to have taken the morphine he had brought from Marseilles. His death certificate, though, says that his cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage – perhaps, Benjamin’s biographers speculate, the Spanish doctor was bribed by the other refugees to say that in order to spare them a scandal that would have made their return to France more likely. The date on the certificate is September 26. The following day the border reopened. Had he not taken the morphine, he would have been allowed safe transit across Spain and thence to America.
When they heard the news of Benjamin’s death, Theodor and Gretel Adorno were plunged into despair over what they took to be their friend’s suicide. If only, Adorno wrote to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin could have held out for twelve more hours he would have been saved. ‘It is completely incomprehensible – as if he had been gripped by a stupor and wished to obliterate himself even though he had already been rescued.’13
Daring theories have, since Benjamin’s death, rushed in to fill that gap in comprehensibility. Among them is one that suggests Stalin’s henchmen killed Benjamin. In The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin, Stephen Schwartz, a Montenegro-based journalist, wrote that Stalinist agents were operating in the south of France and northern Spain during the early years of the war, when the Nazi–Soviet pact was still in operation. The result was that two of the most powerful secret police forces in Europe were working in close co-operation. ‘Unquestionably the Soviet secret police was operating a chokepoint in southern France – sifting through the wave of fleeing exiles for targets of liquidation’, wrote Schwartz. ‘Walter Benjamin walked straight into this maelstrom of evil. And, although his acolytes have chosen to ignore it, he was eminently qualified to appear on a Soviet hit list.’ Others whom Schwartz reckoned fell prey to what he calls the Stalinist ‘killerati’ included the German communist Willi Münzenberg, that former spy for Stalin, who in Paris had become a leader of the German émigré anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist community until forced, like Benjamin, to flee the Nazi advance. But Münzenberg was arrested and imprisoned at an internment camp. He was later freed but found hanging from a tree near Grenoble, murdered, Schwartz claims, by a Soviet agent masquerading as a fellow jailed socialist. Schwartz argues that the man who knew most about Russian disinformation operations was airbrushed from history.14
But why would Benjamin attract similar attentions from Stalin’s henchmen? Schwartz notes that a few months before he died, Benjamin wrote his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, one of the most insightful analyses of the failure of Marxism ever produced. He died at a time when many former Soviet loyalists were becoming disillusioned with Moscow because of the Hitler–Stalin pact. In response Stalinist agents, often recruited from socialist intellectuals, were carrying out assassinations. Benjamin had, perhaps unwittingly, associated with Comintern agents. Schwartz wrote: ‘Benjamin was part of a subculture honeycombed with dangerous people – it was known not to be safe.’ In the late thirties, argues Schwartz, Stalinist agents in Spain were assigned to track down German-speaking anti-Stalinists and torture them into making false confessions. ‘Moscow wanted a parallel, outside Soviet borders, to the infamous purge trials.’ Perhaps, but Walter Benjamin was hardly a threat to Soviet communist orthodoxy akin to Leon Trotsky, murdered in Mexican exile one month before Benjamin’s death. Unlike other victims of Stalin’s killerati, Benjamin was never a member of the Communist Party. Nor was his eccentric brand of theologically and mystically infused Marxism (which even his friend Brecht called ‘ghastly’) a real and present threat to Stalin. Moreover, Schwartz offers no compelling account of precisely how Stalin’s henchmen were supposed to have murdered him.
But if the murder theory seems dubious, so, argues Schwartz, is the suicide theory. Documentation by a Spanish judge shows no evidence of the presence of drugs. It is by no means certain that the doctor’s report that a cerebral haemorrhage, perhaps aggravated by the exertion of crossing the Pyrenees, killed him, is false. One more mystery surrounding Walter Benjamin’s death remains. What was in the black attaché case and what happened to it? One story is that the case was entrusted to a fellow refugee who lost it on a train from Barcelona to Madrid. But what was the manuscript? A completed version of The Arcades Project? A new version of the book on Baudelaire? His biographers discount these possibilities, arguing that his health was so bad he worked only sporadically in the last year of his life so such huge literary tasks would have been beyond him. Or perhaps it was a refined version of his last essay, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Again, his biographers Eiland and Jennings doubt this, arguing that Benjamin would not have attributed such significance to a new version unless it differed markedly from the copies he’d entrusted to Hannah Arendt in Marseilles. Of course, that is hardly a decisive argument; perhaps it was precisely that: a revision made on the run of an essay already shot through with hopes for redemption. But even if so, we will most likely never know what it contained.
Instead, we have the version of the essay that Hannah Arendt, luckier than Benjamin, was able to give to Adorno in New York and which was published in 1942 by the Institute. That version had an electrifying effect on Adorno and Horkheimer. For Adorno it chimed with his own way of thinking, ‘above all to the idea of history as a permanent catastrophe, the criticism of progress, the domination of nature and the attitude to culture’.15 It’s worth pointing out, though, that the essay has also been taken to be a rejection of history as a process of continuous progress, and in particular a gnomic critique of Benjamin’s contemporaries, the vulgar Marxist ideologues of the Second and Third Internationals. They, Benjamin may well have been suggesting, albeit obliquely, took historical materialism as asserting that there is continuum of progress towards a benign resolution, namely a communist utopia. Certainly, the angel of history whom Benjamin invokes in thesis IX is a figure who inverts such crude historical materialism: for the angel, the past is not a chain of events but a single catastrophe and the task of any justifiable historical materialism is not to predict revolutionary future or communist utopia, but to attend to and thereby redeem the sufferings of the past.
Dialectic of Enlightenment, the great book that Adorno and Horkheimer would write in their Californian exile, could be read as an extrapolation of the eighteen theses Benjamin proposed in this essay, his intellectual testament. Today, written in both Catalan and German on his tombstone in Port Bou is a quotation from thesis VII of that essay: ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’16